Mosey on down and have a swig at the Barbary Red

So they say there aren't enough pubs in which to wet your whistle in downtown Stockton, and the city hasn't taken advantage of its greatest resource, the waterfront?

Mike Klocke

So they say there aren't enough pubs in which to wet your whistle in downtown Stockton, and the city hasn't taken advantage of its greatest resource, the waterfront?

Nonsense. Things seemed to be jumping the other day at a joint called Barbary Red - Toast of the Stockton Waterfront.

What's this about the local jail, that there isn't enough room to house inmates? There was enough space to incarcerate a supposed bad guy - who looked an awful lot like Captain Kirk - after he allegedly robbed the Bank of Stockton.

And who says newspapers are struggling? The Stockton newspaper was digging up all kinds of stories and the editor even had a bit of an outlandish motto painted on the wall behind his desk.

OK, so all of this was happening in Stockton during episodes of "The Big Valley" - which are now showing up on a concoction of a network called INSP, short for Inspiration TV.

It's a bit of an odd network, filled with hours of religious-related content followed by hours of westerns - "The Big Valley," "The High Chaparral," "Bonanza," etc.

I'm a sucker for television shows that involve Stockton and the San Joaquin Valley, which explains all the hours I've spent watching "Sons of Anarchy" long after the FX motorcycle gang themed show jumped the shark.

But in "The Big Valley," the Barkleys have reeled us in - my wife first ran across the show one night watching television - and it's mainly because of all of the Stockton story lines. Now we watch it a couple of times a week.

You have the overacting Barkley boys - Jarrod, Nick and Heath (Lee Majors, in his pre-"Six Million Dollar Man" days) - showing all sorts of macho bravado. You have a milk-and-cookies Linda Evans before she morphed into a "Dynasty" vixen. And there's Barbara Stanwyck as the widowed family matriarch, a classic combination of elegance and grittiness.

"The Big Valley" was on ABC from 1965 through 1969 and - based on story lines - could be dated as happening in the 1870s or early 1880s. It was purportedly based on the historic Hill Ranch, which was at the western edge of Calaveras County. That meant there were many Barkley "trips to town" into Stockton.

Almost every episode is good for a guest-star sighting of someone who went on to fame: Dennis Hopper, Katharine Ross, Milton Berle, Charles Bronson, Adam West (Batman!), Robert Goulet, Richard Dreyfuss, Regis Philbin, Cloris Leachman, Wayne Rogers and Pernell Roberts come to mind.

My current viewing game consists of waiting for a prominent visual mention of Stockton, grabbing the TV remote control to hit "pause" and then snapping a smartphone photo of the screen for posterity.

That's led to a photo of a bar called the Barbary Red - Toast of the Stockton Waterfront. Its less-than-upstanding owner was Jill St. John, one of the bombshell redheads of the '60s and '70s. She had a human trafficking business on the side.

Another episode had William Shatner plotting to rob the Bank of Stockton. The future "Star Trek" captain had second thoughts and didn't go through with the heist. But that didn't stop him from having to spend a few nights in Stockton Jail.

Another interesting episode dealt with the town newspaper, The Stockton Eagle, trying to dig up dirt on the Barkley family's past. The editor's office wall was emblazoned with the words: "Stockton Eagle: The Truth No Matter Who It Hurts."

"The Big Valley" actually got more popular in syndication (in the late 1970s, early 1980s) than during its original four-year run. Out of about 85 network shows, it finished somewhere in the 40s in the viewer ratings.

It's on at 9 p.m. most weeknights on INSP, which is available from some providers (I get it on Uverse) but not on others. It's also available every afternoon on KCRA's second channel, 3.2, available over the air and on most cable systems.

You'll enjoy all of the Stockton mentions, even if they do come with a caveat: Virtually all of the filming was done in Southern California.

Contact Record editor Mike Klocke at (209) 546-8250 or mklocke@recordnet.com.